We are delighted to announce new features for customers looking to run high performance databases in the cloud with the launch of Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS and EBS-Optimized instances for Amazon EC2.

Provisioned IOPS are a new EBS volume type designed to deliver predictable, high performance for I/O intensive workloads, such as database applications, that rely on consistent and fast response times. With EBS Provisioned IOPS, customers can flexibly specify both volume size and volume performance, and Amazon EBS will consistently deliver the desired performance over the lifetime of the volume. Customers can then attach multiple volumes to an Amazon EC2 instance and stripe across them to deliver thousands of IOPS to their application.

To enable Amazon EC2 instances to fully utilize the IOPS provisioned on an EBS volume, we’re also introducing the ability to launch selected Amazon EC2 instance types as EBS-Optimized instances. EBS-Optimized instances deliver dedicated throughput between Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS, with options between 500 Megabits per second and 1,000 Megabits per second depending on the instance type used.